Humans Will Love Robots More When They’re Flawed:
Human beings are less than perfect. We forget things, get angry, and have our vices. So how likely is it that we would relate to a robot that’s perfect in every single way?
Not likely, according to researchers over at the University of Lincoln, who’ve just presented their findings at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference in Hamburg. They say that in the future, humans will probably accept their robotic pals more quickly if they’re just as flawed as we are.
Source: Vice Magazine
Imagine if, decades from now, a computer spat out a brilliant design for a vehicle so novel that we humans have no choice but to call it an act of imagination.
One day, University of Wyoming AI researcher Jeff Clune plans to build this kind of artificially intelligent agent, and he already has the blueprints.
Source: Vice Magazine
A future in which man and machine merge together — the so-called “Singularity” scenario proposed by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil — might be closer than we think. Just consider some of the self-proclaimed “cyborgs” already living amongst us, two of whom made an appearance at the recent Robotronica event in Australia.
There’s a colorblind artist, Neil Harbisson, who has an antenna permanently implanted in his skull so that he can detect color frequencies in front of him, turning his grayscale world into a world filled with colors. There’s a choreographer, Moon Ribas, who has an online sensor attached to her skin that can be activated in real-time anytime there’s an earthquake in the world. And there’s a performance artist, Stelarc, who has developed a third ear for his arm (soon to be complete with Wi-Fi and microphone) so that others on the Internet can hear what he’s hearing.
Source: Washington Post
This Robot Mom Builds Kids and Judges Which Is Best:
Researchers at Cambridge University and ETH Zurich have built a robot mom capable of independently building a set of kids. But the robot mom not only assembles her automaton family from plastic cubes equipped with motors, she also evaluates which of her cubic kids is best, and bases her next generation on these winning traits. So it’s survival of the fittest, but robo-style.
Source: Vice Magazine
The robots of DARPA’s final Robotics Challenge won’t be coming for your job just yet — they still need a lot of human help to get out the door.
Source: theverge
7 hilarious robo-falls from the DARPA challenge
DARPA’s Robotics Challenge is a collection of some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, and the brilliant and unique machines they build and command. Every time one of these automatons performs the simplest of tasks—whether it’s closing a valve or opening a door, or navigating some uneven terrain—it’s a mammoth accomplishment of technology.
In 1989 Norman Cousins wrote a piece saying that computers are coming and let’s not have them dehumanize us. He recommended that in order to do that, every time they have a technician working on something that they should hire a poet to work with them. As the robots proliferate in our lives, in order to keep them humanized, we need to not just have computer scientists in the room, but have the arts and humanities side by side with what they are doing. I think that’s the real beauty of what is going on here.